… of Warren Buffet. The billionaire “uncle” of Jimmy Buffet is 74. (Actually distant cousins.)

… of Jerry Tarkanian. The Shark is also 74.

… of John Phillips. The Papa is 69. (The other Papa was Denny Doherty.)

… of Molly Ivins. The columnist is 60.

… of Peggy Lipton. The Mod Squad member is 57.

… of Lewis Black. The comedian, and regular on The Daily Show, is 56.

… of Cameron Diaz. Princess Fiona is 32.

… of John McCain. The Senator who doesn’t know what he stands for is 68.

… of Elliott Gould. The original “Trapper” John McIntyre and former Mr. Barbra Streisand is 66.

… of William Friedkin. The Oscar-winning director (The French Connection) is 65.

… of Michael Jackson. He was born in 1958, but who knows what that is in Michael years.

… of Rebecca DeMornay. The actress is 42.

… of German author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, born in Frankfurt on this date in 1749. Goethe said, “One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.”

… of Mother Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton, the first American-born saint, born in New York City on this date in 1774.

… of Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, born near Tula on this date in 1828.

… of ornithologist Roger Tory Peterson, born in Jamestown, New York, on this date in 1908.

… of Nathanael Greene, born on this date in 1742. Greene was a major general in the American army during the Revolutionary War and was the primary architect of American success in the south.

… of Ernest Thayer, author of the baseball poem Casey at the Bat. Thayer was born on this date in 1863, attended Harvard where he was an editor of the Harvard Lampoon along with William Randolph Hearst. Hearst offered Thayer a job writing poems for the San Francisco Examiner and “Casey” was published in the Examiner in 1888.

… of Ralph Bunche, born on this date in 1904.

Like his world, Dr. Bunche was a man of many faces and talents, full of paradox and struggle. By training and temperament, he was an ideal international civil servant, a black man of learning and experience open to men and ideas of all shades.

At the United Nations, he had been a key diplomat for more than two decades since his triumphal success in negotiating the difficult 1949 armistice between the new state of Israel and the Arab states.

As the architect of the Palestine accord, he won the Nobel Peace Prize of 1950.

Source: The New York Times obituary for Bunche, 1971.

… of Steve Martin, born in Waco on this date in 1945. “Well, EXCUSE me.”

… of Oscar winner Charlize Theron, who was born on this date in 1975.